


Look Alive

by RosaLui



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Killjoys, Crossdressing, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Keep Running, Keep it Ugly, Rebellion a la V for Vendetta, Shoutout to Frankenberry the Cereal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-01
Updated: 2011-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-19 20:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1482136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosaLui/pseuds/RosaLui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been a long time since Party Poison had worn lipstick, but that didn’t mean he had forgotten how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look Alive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crimsoncourt](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Crimsoncourt).



> Written to Placebo's _Meds_ and Hans Zimmer’s _528491_ on repeat.
> 
> No real Party Poisons were forced to make out with their evil overlords in the making of this fic.

Tod worked reception.

He had a very ordered life, did Tod; the same cubicle, same endless shift of paper, same visitors to sign in.

He liked it. Every afternoon he popped in to see Maud, the secretary bot at Personnel Welfare, just to assure her of his appreciation for his job here at BL/ind Advertising & Internal Marketing.  He couldn’t always remember what life had been like before he started working here, but he knew it hadn’t been nearly as happy.

Then he went to lunch, took his pills, went home, and slept.

Domestic bliss, it was. 

He’d even been great with keeping his house clean recently. He’d finally thrown out all of his books, and the doctors were very pleased. He was almost done, they had told him yesterday – or last week – or some time recently. Done with what, he wasn’t sure, but it had to be something good.

Sometimes, when he’d had a good day and didn’t need as many pills, he could actually remember the things that went on at work besides what TV programs were showing on the little LCD screen at his desk.

Like the models that came in.

Most females he knew were more like his mother, an aproned, smiling woman with lots of aproned, smiling friends, who baked all day while waiting for their husbands to come home.

But these models were women sculpted for television, for advertising vacuum cleaners and soaps and tupperware, or maybe computers and wall-size entertainment units.  They were stick women with black bobs and calm expressions, who scribbled a mark next to their name on his time sheet before being swept off to the big glass elevator across the hall, to be filmed selling BL/ind’s latest products.

The big glass elevator was new, and something that the security teams at BL/ind were particularly proud of – it was unhackable, and only moved when the employees in floors above above told it to.  This was an important building, after all. Tod might only have dealt with advertising down here on Level 4, but up on Level 102 was where they filmed important reports for Fact News Live.

The camera rooms had been Improved recently, too; new, cost-effective machinery took the place of the lighting crew, making everything much easier for the directors.  Maud had told Tod that reception would be getting Improved soon too. He wasn’t sure what that meant.

He was interrupted in his musings as the entranceway doors slid open in a soundless glide, the sign of his 2 o’clock appointment.

It was 2:09.

 _Late_ , thought Tod. _But they’re never late._ And then he saw her, and he blinked.

She was tall, which was normal, but her posture was slouched – almost hunched – something that surely, a doctor could have fixed for her by now. Her lipstick was too red, and moreover, she was – her hair –

“Christina, 2 o’clock,” she said, flashing a laminated pass.  Her voice was rough and soft.

He was supposed to ask for a retinal scan next. “That’s not normal,” he said instead.

She chewed on a fingernail, staring at him with wide hazel eyes, and licked the corner of her lips before saying, “Just sign me in.”

“But you haven’t even brushed it,” he pressed on, eyes on the unkempt mess. “It’s not… Perfect. They always want it to be Perfect.”

Her lips pressed together, like Tod was a fly in her chardonnay.

Why had he even thought that? There were no flies, not anymore. Flies brought disease, and the Industries had fixed that a long time ago.

“Sign me in,” she said again, and distracted now, he did so. 

“Keep smiling,” he said, and tapped in the code to give the all-clear.

“Keep fuckin’ smiling, man,” she said, and walked past him into the elevator. She waved as she left, pinky sticking out oddly.

Within minutes, he had forgotten she existed.

* * *

 

“All clear?” The voice was crackly from bad reception in the tiny earpiece. The familiar deadpan was welcome after the receptionist, with whom conversation had been like trying to make oneself understood to a very small cactus.  Mind-numbing, and ultimately useless.

“Fuckin’ A,” Party Poison answered as best he could, holding his lips open as a droid slathered gloss over them and wishing he could do it himself. It had been a while since Party had worn lipstick, but that didn’t mean he had forgotten how.

The wardrobe room was bright, full of racks of clothing, vanities in neat rows, and faceless beautician droids.

And his vanity had a mirror.  The first big, clean mirror he had seen in years. The first since dying his hair just weeks out of the City, Crazy Clown Red dripping down his arms in a shitty Zone 2 bathroom with a rusted sink and bare bulb.

“Hurry. We’ve got 30 minutes before they realize there’s a system failure,” Kobra Kid’s voice continued. “Less if they find Mr. Tina.”

Mr. Tina was a wild tomcat they’d rescued a while back, flea-covered and barely surviving off of dumpster scraps. They had put him to good work as soon as they broke through the City barrier - Jet Star and Fun Ghoul had left him meowing happily at an aquarium simulation in Quadrant 3, quite innocent of the jammers hidden in his collar, before tearing off to continue the diversion, pigs hot on their tail.

Twenty minutes until the 3 o’clock news went live around Battery City.

Twenty-five minutes until the real 2 o’clock girl woke up in a supply closet downstairs.

Thirty minutes til the jammers failed. 

Gerard rubbed his lips together experimentally, tilting his head in the mirror. His hair fell more naturally than it used to, his face was thinner, and his skin was tanned from the sun, red and peeling slightly on the bridge of his nose. He looked nothing at all like the man who had walked out three years ago. He could remember every single moment of every shitty thing that had happened since then, and he loved it.

“You there yet?” He asked, wrinkling his nose as a droid came at him with a powder puff.

“We’re in, no one saw us. James checked in. He said it’s done, he brought the cameras up himself.”  There was a crackling sound, then, “Zoid wants to know how you look.”

“Tell her I look like a hot chick.” Then he took the communicator from his ear and tossed it in the trash.

“Process complete,” said the tinny voice of the droid above him.  “Please note that we have finished preparing your face in only 11 minutes, and complete  a satisfaction card as you exit to inform our engineers of our efficiency. Keep smiling.”

As the droid rolled away, Party Poison stood and did an experimental hip waggle in the mirror.  It was fucking amazing, really. The right little black dress and you couldn’t even tell he had a dick.

* * *

 

Two BL/ind Advertising employees were waiting at the door, smiles large, eyes blank.

“You’re so pretty,” one said happily, leading them down a brightly lit hallway. “Isn’t she pretty? She’s like that actress from that program – you know the one.”

“Oh, that program,” gushed the second. “It’s so wonderful, with the – with the funny – I was thinking of getting my face done, you know. To look just like her, I mean.”

They reached a set of large double doors, white like the walls except for a small plaque that read ‘ _Studio_.’

“But your hair, though,” said the first girl suddenly, turning to look. “It’s not quite… what have you done with it?”

Party glanced at the clock ticking along on the opposite wall.

Twenty-three minutes until Scarecrow could trace them to exactly where they all were.

Eighteen until the alert sounded.

Thirteen until showtime.

“It’s red,” he said. “You even used to know what that meant, once.” And he stepped through the doors, locking them behind him.

* * *

 

Party Poison had spent the better part of the last few years in a gang that specialized in looking like they wanted to fuck men for money. He wasn’t sure if it was a sign of defiance or a pretense at invitation – maybe both.  He knew guys who fucked for money and they were good people, knew that his own pretty face had gotten him into more places than it rightfully should.

(Like here, he supposed. Here was actually a really, really good example.)

But it meant that he wasn’t unused to having guys’ eyes on him, or to playing it up to get what he wanted.

(His brother was even better at it.  People liked his brother, and the fact that he looked half male model, half starving orphan waif left people sensitive to his charms.)

His brother would be laughing his ass off if he saw where Party Poison was now.

Admittedly, this was a bit more hardcore than hanging out in a back alley somewhere, waiting under the fluorescent lights for some guy with money in his pockets and a boner in his pants to come along so they could gank and rob him.

The director of the shoot was tall, hair shorn and gelled, suit tidy and smelling of plastic.  He was particularly blank of expression but once in a while smiled like someone had rubbed Vaseline on his teeth.

The security badge on his chest read ‘ _Employee 109_ ,’ whatever the fuck that meant.

And he wasn’t on any pills. Not like the others, at least.

He was one of the decision-makers at BL/ind – a low-level boot-licker, but one of the brains of the operation nonetheless. He was in charge of advertising, meaning that everything they wanted to propagandize, every product or idea or way of thinking, passed through him. He dealt with the girls who sold the products, and okayed each and every subliminal message that management passed down for him to incorporate.

He was smart, 109, and more clear-headed than anyone downstairs.  Party  Poison looked a fuck of a lot like the girl whose pass he’d stolen – they’d picked her carefully, aided by hacker friends in the City who were positive that she was just another girl with a black-and-white headshot, no one who would have met the director face-to-face before.

But from the way 109 was looking at him, there had maybe been a little too much alone time spent with the girl’s photo.  Party had to play into that before the man realized that this was not the right girl.

“Where do you want me?” He asked.

“On your knees.” The two of them were alone in the room, spotlights bright on the camera and plain white backdrop.  The director was looking where Party’s tits would have been, if he’d had any.

Party wondered how many girls had come in to do an advertisement and left having done something else besides.

He hated men like this most of all.

But it was not like he hadn’t seen the stripper droids in Zone 3 working it on poles and floors and people. He had a natural propensity toward 'big fucking drama queen'; he might as well put it to use.

So he got down on his knees, looked up through his lashes, and smiled.

“I think,” said the director, rubbing his hands in anticipation, “we’ll have a quick… rehearsal, before we start shooting.” He moved away from the camera slightly.

It was 2:57.

The cameras were new ones; BL/ind had started producing them just the year before. They wanted a complete and total monopoly on what material was produced and distributed, so they locked down all their equipment, to be activated only by locking code and thumbprint of a qualified person.

“How about,” said Party, letting one dress strap slip down a freckled shoulder,  “you turn that camera on and I’ll give you a little extra film to take home tonight instead.”  He shook his hair out of his eyes for effect, tongue dragging over his teeth and fiddling something hidden behind a back left molar.

With fumbling hands, the director activated the camera.

Party grinned, teeth bared.  “Now kiss me, you animal.” And he reached out, grabbed the man by the back of his oily head, and dragged him toward his open mouth.

109 could tell something was wrong as soon as he tasted Party’s teeth. Pretty manufactured models in Battery City didn’t taste like cigarettes and the desert. But he didn’t notice the poison pill Party was shoving down the back of his throat with his tongue, not until he had already started to seize.

It took until 2:59 for 109 to finally choke and die.

Letting the man’s corpse drop, Party moved back and stood in front of the camera.

Somewhere in the middle of the City, the number screen on the great tower clicked to 3 o’clock.

In every home, bus, school and shopping mall, the television switched on.

And ten blocks down in the transmission center, Kobra Kid flipped a switch.

“Hey there, ritalin rats,” Party Poison said, face and voice streaming live in the place of News AgoGo’s stupid, bland, perfectly combed head.

They could hear him by now, all of them – the masses in jobs and in shops, on trams and trains and city squares. The news report was the most important part of the day. Everyone watched it, and right now everyone was watching a chick in a too-short dress with too-deep voice, black straps askew, hair tousled and flamingly, defiantly red.

Not exactly the face of a savior they were seeing, or a rebel, or fucking V for Vendetta or whatever.

That was fine.

It might remind them of how messed up and strange and original they used to be, back before everything became _perfect_.

“If you live in this fucking purgatory they like to call Battery City, you know they’re trying to clean you up,” Party Poison said. “They’re gonna try to fix your face and make you pretty. They’re telling you that you’re living in the best world there is, the happiest fucking place on earth. There’s no disease and no dirt and no sickness in fucking Pleasantville, just blue simulated skies and white walls and plastic grass.

“So here’s a challenge, for all you hard-working people out there in Battery City. You know what I want you to fuckin’ do? I want you to keep it ugly. I want you to keep it fucking ugly.”

They would be mobilizing now – Dracs would be abandoning the chase for the other Killjoys, running for the newsroom of the tower.  Techs would be on the computers scanning the entire district and beyond for the source of the electronic interference.

Five minutes before the hack on the systems broke down and the Killjoys were found, all of them.

“And maybe this isn’t new to you, maybe you’ve noticed - not that anything’s wrong, but that _nothing_ is.  Your problems are gone and you don’t get hungry any more, don’t wish you could see the stars or kiss your girlfriend or eat a bowl of motherfucking Frankenberry. And you wanna scream, because all your problems and all your imperfections are what made you _you_ and you never got the chance to deal with your own shit, you just got it erased for you.

“If you’re looking at me, I haven’t got the answers that’ll save you. You gotta try for yourselves, all you ugly, beautiful fucking people out there.”

“So make a choice,” he said into the camera.  “Us or them, whitewash or spray paint, silence or noise, tv shows or the heat of the sun and the sweat and wind and dust of the desert.  Make a choice, and sing it fucking loud.”

The clock hit 3:05. Scarecrow had a lock on his location, now.

Four levels down, he knew Jet Star would be screeching to a halt behind the wheel of the Trans-Am, the other three beside him. It was their getaway plan, and it was shit as always, but they would deal with the aftermath when it came.

“ _Keep running_ ,” he said into the camera.  Then he was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://rosalui.tumblr.com/) l [LJ](http://rosalui.livejournal.com/)


End file.
